McConaghy sailboats: a raceboat yard that became a composite contract builder
McConaghy is an Australian composite boatbuilder whose reputation was built on advanced racing yacht construction long before it became a production multihull builder. From a Sydney skiff- and catamaran-building shop, the yard became an early adopter of aerospace-derived prepreg carbon fibre, then carried that engineering into ownership changes, an international expansion into China, and, decades later, a full range of semi-custom cruising catamarans. Alongside its own models, McConaghy has built for other designers and other projects entirely — foiling dinghies, an America's Cup monohull, and a record-setting submersible — making the yard as much a contract composite builder as a boat brand in its own right.
Origins and ownership
John McConaghy founded the yard in Sydney in 1967, and within a few years his team had engineered a vacuum-formed foam-sandwich fibreglass/Kevlar construction method that proved an immediate success. That growth pushed the company to a new site in Mona Vale, on Sydney's Northern Beaches, in 1989, enabling production of larger yachts along with masts, steering systems, and foils. The company has changed hands only once since founding: in 2000, two McConaghy employees, Jono Morris and Mark Evans, bought it from John McConaghy and his longtime partner Steve Moxham, strengthening a collaboration the pair had already built on Farr 40 production. Evans had joined McConaghy as a shipwright in the mid-1990s, working up through foreman and head foreman before that buyout. In 2006, the company opened a shipyard in China, which the builder credits with fuelling exponential growth and supporting production of several semi-custom product ranges; Evans was based principally there from that year, leading training and skills transfer as the expansion took hold, and went on to hold the titles of Group Director and, by the time of the 2026 Cure Marine acquisition, Group Managing Director. A 2017 account described the company running manufacturing bases in Australia and China alongside a design office in New Zealand, with the Zhuhai workforce having grown from 90 to 400 employees within three years; that same period saw McConaghy relocate its original Australian base from Mona Vale to Gosford on the Central Coast, while Jono Morris stepped back from day-to-day employment there, retaining his role as joint managing director and shareholder of MC2 Composites. In 2014, Hong Kong-based Tiger Group Investments, led by yachtsman Graham Porter, took a stake and funded new facilities in both countries. Evans led the yard's most recent expansion in April 2026: the acquisition of Australian catamaran brand Cure Marine, whose designs and intellectual property moved fully into the McConaghy portfolio as Cure itself moved into McConaghy's facilities.
The designers
McConaghy has spent much of its history building to other designers' drawings rather than only its own. Ker Yacht Design is named as naval architect across the modern MC-Multihulls range — including the MC55, MC68, MC86, and MC100 — per the builder's own model pages, and designed the one-design Ker 40+ that McConaghy built in 2015; the same partnership produced the Kerumba, a Ker-designed IRC 50 cruiser-racer, in 2012. Andrew McDougall designed both of the yard's high-volume foiling dinghies: the Mach2 hydrofoiling Moth, of which McConaghy built 156 in 2015, and the Waszp, developed as an entry-level alternative to the Moth, of which McConaghy built 500 the following year. Further back, McConaghy built to Dubois Naval Architects' design for the 1979 yacht Once More Dear Friends, a Dubois 39. More recently, the yard partnered with Phantom International in 2017 to build that company's range, including the 18-foot foiling catamaran Flying Phantom Essentiel, and with electric propulsion company ZeroJet on the MC-ZERO 450, pairing McConaghy's composite hull-building with ZeroJet's electric jet propulsion for a yacht tender.
Construction through the eras
McConaghy's composite work moved from early experimentation to industry-leading engineering quickly. By the mid-1970s the yard was among the first builders anywhere to apply aerospace-derived prepreg carbon fibre to sailing boat construction, and in 1987 it built what was, at the time, the largest composite structure in the world: the first prepreg Nomex-cored maxi yacht, engineered with Giovanni Belgrano and SP Systems. That capability carried into unconventional projects: McConaghy was approached in 2010 to help explorer-filmmaker James Cameron and engineer Ron Allum build the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER submersible, contributing 95 percent of its composite fabrication, and the vessel carried Cameron eleven kilometres to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in 2012. While running the Chinese operation, Mark Evans oversaw production of more than 200 foiling moths — including the Mach2, described by one account as the world's fastest moth — more than 100 production racing yachts, and nine one-off racing yachts, including America's Cup and Volvo 70 contenders. The same era also produced Wild Oats XI, launched in 2005, which went on to take seven line-honours wins at the Rolex Sydney Hobart Race, and, decades later, the AC40 monohull McConaghy was chosen to build for Emirates Team New Zealand's 37th America's Cup campaign, followed by a 13-metre hydrogen chase boat. In 2014, the Zhuhai yard delivered Adastra, a 42.5-metre Shuttleworth-designed power trimaran that, per a 2026 account, remains the largest vessel McConaghy has built.
Lines and generations
McConaghy launched its first catamaran in February 2018, and within seven years had grown that side of the business into a full multihull operation spanning several distinct ranges: the semi-custom, Ker-designed MC-Multihulls cruising cats described above, plus Panther, Sapphire, GT, Platinum, and Chase Zero, alongside the newly acquired Cure series. Aeroyacht's review of the Panther range credited its construction to advanced carbon fibre. Within MC-Multihulls, the flagship keeps growing: the MC86 extends the low-profile, glass-heavy look of the MC75 by another 11 feet, a design language McConaghy's own model pages describe as now well established across the range.
Who McConaghy is for
McConaghy suits several different buyers under one roof. Someone drawn to composite raceboat pedigree — a yard that pioneered prepreg carbon, helped build an America's Cup monohull and a Mariana-Trench-diving submersible, and turned out record-chasing yachts like Wild Oats XI — is buying into that custom and semi-custom side of the business. A buyer shopping the MC-Multihulls range is instead buying into a single, consistent naval-architecture relationship with Ker Yacht Design, carried across sizes from the MC55 up to the flagship MC115. And sailors racing one-design foiling dinghies encounter McConaghy indirectly, as the builder behind Andrew McDougall's Mach2 and Waszp designs rather than as a brand name on the class itself.